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The Art of Politics

Talking With the Police

By Judy Osborne

Seattle’s Chief of Police is a pretty cool guy. He marches at the head of the Pride Parade every year, provides honest responses to questions even if it hurts, listens to members of the community when they have something to say, takes care of problems instead of covering them up, and comes equipped with a sense of humor.

His name is Norm Stamper, and he arrived in Seattle from San Diego about four years ago. He’s well known as a leader in the relatively recent movement in law enforcement toward "community policing".

Community policing has many facets. At least one of these affects Seattle’s transgender community in a very direct way, and I want to tell you about it.

This facet of community policing involves creating links of communication and trust between the police and various segments of the population, especially those segments who most often consider themselves disenfranchised and discriminated against. Such people often have the most direct contact with the police, and not always on favorable terms. They tend to be the people most aware of law enforcement problems and illegal activities in their neighborhoods.

Stamper is building such links with them through a network of community advisory councils. Councils being planned or already operating deal with Southeast Asians, youths, Latinos, Koreans, African Americans, the disabled, and sexual minorities.

Although I had known something about Stamper’s directness and humor from the newspapers and had felt comfortable in my contacts with the police (we even held a few transgender political meetings in a police station), I didn’t know anything at all about community policing until last April when I was invited to join Stamper’s Sexual Minorities Advisory Council.

I found that fifteen or twenty council members meet each month in a GLBT neighborhood church. Stamper comes to the meetings along with Mark Howard, a Sipowitz kind of guy who heads up the Crime Prevention Division. Gay and lesbian police officers sometimes join the discussions, but no transpeople on the force have identified themselves as yet. We talk about public safety issues relating to GLBT people, plan a curriculum about sexual-minorities for training officers, suggest ways to improve communications and procedures, explore strategies to minimize gay-bashing incidents, and bring up other significant events of the month.

The dialogs often drift into recent community issues like crime trends and street incidents, proposals to improve the reporting of hate crimes, domestic violence in GLBT couples, and ways to resolve controversies. In recent months we have exchanged thoughts about an alternative paper article entitled "Gay-Bashing Cops?" and another in the mainstream press where Stamper revealed that, as a rookie in San Diego, he had baited gays and blacks as part of the police culture of the period.

While Stamper cannot provide details of ongoing investigations and internal personnel matters, our discussions probe deeply below the surface of most issues and are surprisingly frank, sometimes contentious. Honesty is not a scarce commodity. The council system gives Stamper a direct sense of what really is happening in the GLBT community without bureaucratic filtering. In turn, the GLBT community gets direct input into the highest policy levels of the Police Department to solve problems, help redress grievances, take advantage of new opportunities, increase mutual sensitivity between police personnel and GLBT community members, and participate in police training.

Every new officer’s training during the last four years has included a two-hour session given by gay and lesbian volunteers, offering their personal histories, ways to address and deal with community members to avoid conflicts, the community’s history, youth issues, and transgender issues. Our council has been given the task of updating the curriculum and phasing ourselves in as the source of trainers, and we currently are supporting the existing volunteers during an overlap period. I attended one class as an observer and was invited to speak about the transgender experience. The class members were courteous, even warmly so, in response. I since have presented at another session and intend to make sure someone from our community speaks at each in order to lend a human face to the transgender topic.

The council is preparing a survey to be distributed widely in late Fall. The survey is designed to identify shortcomings of the Police Department as perceived by the GLBT community and solicit ideas to fix them. We also want to find more ways to increase cooperation and understanding among police officers and GLBT people, improve crime reporting, and discover new ideas which could improve law enforcement and minimize conflict. Specific transgender questions included in the survey solicit opinions about proposals to establish a standardized procedure for police to follow when stopping a transgendered person, and then communicating that procedure widely to the trans community to minimize the danger of a panic reaction; improve incident/arrest sheets to specify transgender; determine with whom we should be housed if we land in jail; and possibly create an official, but voluntary, two-sided ID card for crossdressers to use for positive identification whichever way dressed when dealing with the police, entering clubs or cashing checks. The responses we receive from a substantial cross section of the community will be used to guide where we go with these and other ideas.

A story has circulated for some time that Stamper glanced out his hotel window at six one morning when he was first in Seattle interviewing for his job. There on a cold streetcorner he noticed a bunch of pedestrians waiting for the walk light, even though not a car could be seen in any direction. Stamper decided then and there that Seattle might be a good place to run the Police Department.

The citizens of Seattle have always been grateful to that bunch of pedestrians, and to the mayor who talked them into standing there that morning.

Please be sure to vote.

Your comments, in support or in disagreement, will be gratefully received -- heyjude@eskimo.com

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